Hello world - RuTube, it's essentially a Russian YouTube clone with the least original name
possible.
Here you can watch anything from your typical prank videos to all the pro Putin news you'd
ever be able to stomach.
But why the vast array of what feels like Kremlin propaganda?
Well, it might have something to do with the fact that RuTube is kinda owned by Russian
government.
Well, on paper it's owned by "Gazprom-Media", which are themselves owned by "Gazprom" - Russia's
largest energy company, which the Russian government just so happens to have controlling
stake in.
So RuTube's user base has grown exponentially since the invasion - Russians have been flocking
to it fearing that Putin would actually go ahead and ban YouTube, which hasn't happened,
at least not yet.
This site has everything you'd expect from a YouTube clone, even a dreaded "shorts" section.
But on the 9th of May, RuTube disappeared from the internet and was replaced with a
notice, "Attention", "The site has been attacked" - it turns out that overnight the site had
been hit with a crippling attack, the details of which are potentially kinda ridiculous,
but we'll get to those shortly.
Now, as expected, whenever there's an apparent case of hacktivism, a bunch of twitter accounts
with "Anonymous" in their name jumped on board to claim responsibility, despite having absolutely
nothing to do with it.
And because of this, news sites will often falsely attribute hacks to whatever twitter
account manages to tweet about it first, which in this case was the account "PuckArcs", they
quoted their sources saying RuTube was now apparently completely "unrecoverable", but
leaving out any explanation of why.
The actual perpetrators of this attack seems to be a Ukrainian hacktivist group - with
a very fitting name given what they did to RuTube, I found them leaking data they stole
from RuTube on mega - looks to be a bunch of RuTube's source code.
Unfortunately though, it's now inaccessible, and I can't seem to find a mirror anywhere.
The twitter account has been silent ever since, but they did post screenshots of what looks
like rutube's backend - as well as various leaked documents, ironically showing that
just last year RuTube had completed pentesting audits costing them tens of millions of rubles,
this amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Whilst the group running this twitter account seems to have actually carried out the hack,
the IT Army Of Ukraine - a collective of pro Ukrainian hacktivists organised by Ukraine's
government themselves also took credit for RuTube's pwning - I can only guess these guys
are somehow affiliated with the IT Army Of Ukraine?
But, anyhow, the IT army released a video containing some interesting details about
the hack.
So apparently in addition to bringing down RuTube, the perpetrators were also able to
compromise the pass card system for RuTube's server room and lock all the employees inside,
which after several hours led to the server room door having to be physically broken down.
But, there's no evidence of this at all, no hacked CCTV footage or anything, if that's
true that is pretty funny, but again, no evidence, sadly.
The hack itself went down on the 9th of May, and this timing was no accident.
It was done on this day to coincide with Russia's annual victory day parade - which is typically
seen as a commemoration of the end of the second world war - y'know a good thing, but
this year of course things were slightly different, and in RuTube's official Telegram channel,
they admitted "Someone really wanted to prevent RuTube from showing the victory parade and
fireworks".
So, RuTube was down, but this hack wasn't the only one to coincide with the day of the
parade.
Check this out, it's a video of a Russian TV schedule, the name of every single programme
on every single channel is identical, in English they all say "On your hands is the blood of
thousands of Ukrainians and their hundreds of murdered children.
TV and the authorities are lying.
No to war".
So, which group did this, or whether it was an inside job - we just have absolutely zero
information.
But back to RuTube, far from being gone forever as the attackers originally claimed, after
just 3 days rutube.ru returned and seems to be working as normal.
RuTube hasn't made public many details about the attack, but they did claim on Telegram
that it wasn't an inside job, but rather it originated from outside the company.
And Russian state owned media company TASS is reporting "The attack harmed more than
75% of databases and infrastructure of the [live site] and 90% of backup copies" - I'm
assuming by "harmed" they mean deleted, but I'm kinda still confused, because they also
say "The whole library, including user content, as well as the source code are intact", so
what exactly was affected isn't really clear, and given the non existent level of Russian
government transparency we'll probably never know for sure.
So RuTube lives on, at rutube.ru if you're curious enough to check it out.
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